Does anyone actually "use" this product?

[pstupp]

Hi,

I'm currently evaluating Sugar as a low cost alternative to Salesforce. On the surface it seems like a comprehensive solution with a marketing checkmark for each of the salesforce offerings. Clearly a lot of time and effort has gone into the solution but after installing and playing around with it for a few days I'm beginning to wonder if it's even possible to use it in a real business environment. Without exaggeration, 50 - 60% of the functionality that I've tried simply doesn't work without having to modify or, at the very least, read through the source code for clarification. I thought perhaps that it was just the community edition but I downloaded an evaluation copy of Enterprise and although it has more features, all of the basic capabilities that I'm trying to use have exactly the same bugs as community.

This may sound negative and antagonistic but I'm genuinely trying to figure out if this is a real product or just a very elaborate beta test while preparing to launch. Don't get me wrong they have some very ambitious goals and there's even some half decent code but I wonder if they should focus on getting fewer things right rather than trying to match feature for feature what Salesforce does.

Ok, so here's what I'm looking for. If you are running Sugar for your business please let me know what version you're running, what you do with it and how much time and/or money you've spent getting to this point. I'd really like to make Sugar work for my business but after 4 days of constant bugs and failures I'm beginning to wonder if it wouldn't simply be cheaper to go with Salesforce. From what I can tell this might be a good alternative after a few more years of development but I'm not anxious to invest time and money into something that simply cannot deliver - if it has worked for you please let me know.

I look forward to your feedback.
Thank you.

[kuske]

We replaced salesforce by sugar ce, wrote our own reporting module and have no problems.

As we have more then 100 users this is a well-priced solution for us, as apex e.g. was only available in the unlimited edition of sf. In suagr we can change the modules and write own modules in php working on a real database and not on a soapy data thing.

I think everybody must decide for himself, how many money to spent in a own develepment and how many money to spent in outsourcing (only my humble opinion).

hk

[sapmin]

We have two clients using it. One is a Home Builder and the other is a Steel Fabricator. Neither uses all of the functionality but both rely on Sugar for leads from their websites, email campaigns and customer communication.

I'd be curious to know more about the things you found that don't work and needed more clarification.

[pstupp]

Thanks Kuske,

I can see how with 100 users you could afford to invest at least one FTE on building an enhancing the solution in your environment. For us with just 5 users it's a much harder argument, particularly when many things fail to work upon installation. Here are a few examples of the things that have me pulling my hair out trying to justify the 1/3 (hosted Enterprise), 2/3 (in house Enterprise) or ??? (in house CE) savings.

1) E-Mail campaigns don't actually send e-mails - found bug in code and fixed

2) Campaign e-mails being sent without sender or reply to e-mail address - tracked through code to identify an obscure undocumented references to another form with optional fields that were actually required to get this to work (despite having reasonable default values specified in documented fields in documented forms).

3) After adding a custom field to the contacts module and adding it to the quick view, no other records were visible in the browser after the fist 20. Deleting the field gives an error and the problem persists. Wasted half a day tracking down the files that had been updated to reflect these changes, eventually figured out that deleting them didn't break anything else but I still don't have my custom field which may make the whole solution unusable.

There are constant bugs and usability issues, some of which can be ignored / worked around but many, such as #3 above, cannot. Given that I can easily generate enough revenue to pay for our 5 enterprise licenses in a week, how much time can I really jistify wasting on trying to get the product to run - customizing it to our needs is one thing but basic out-of-the-box functionality is quite another. I do agree with one thing though, the ability to have access to the source code and database is about the only remaining thing keeping me from giving up completely but I just don't know how much more time I can afford to spend on this.

If there are any other users that think this is beyond just an alpha / beta stage please let me know. Otherwise I suspect I'll just wait for it to mature before trying again. I'm also interested in hearing if anyone has had any better experience with the hosted version, do they make any more of an effort to make this stuff work for paying customers or is it the exact same code?

Thanks again

[malcolmh]

Hi,

We have over 20 customers happily using SugarCRM ranging from sizes from 5 to almost 200 users. Most of these customers use Pro.

Importantly all of these customers are still using 4.5.1. There a some great new feautres in 5.0 and will be even greater when everything works!

We have NOT yet recommended any of our customers to migrate to 5.0. Expericence with previous major releases shows that you have to wait several patches (c - e) before you have a version that is useable in a production environment.

Try 4.5.1h which has most of the 5.0 feautures (expect Ajax Email Client & Module Builder) and migrate to 5.0 when a stable 5.0 version is available

[pstupp]

Sorry Sapmin, didn't mean to snub you - I must have been in the middle of my post when you wrote yours. I've listed a few of biggest sources of frustration; I'm very interested in your thoughts / feedback. I guess I really expected a much more finished product for a company with so much marketing, again it's clear that a lot of work is going into the product but I just don't see how anyone could actually use it right now - please help me to understand what I'm missing.

Thanks again,

[ps2rs4]

Thanks Malcom, looks like we collided on that posting also. I'll fire up another environment (I do love VMWare) and try out v4.5.1 although I started there and upgraded in the hopes that it would resolve the e-mail campaign problem which I later resolved via the code. I won't miss the ajax mail client although there are some nice ajax featues (that actually work) elsewhere in the product that I hope won't be lost. I hadn't seen any posts saying that v5.0 wasn't stable so I appreicate you sharing your knowledge here. Perhaps my expectations are too high for an open source product or perhaps it is too early in the product lifecycle for me but, again, the marketing would lead me to believe that things are much further along. It seems ok for a basic contact / opportunity manager and I've even managed to get a few e-mail campaigns together but I'm concerned that as my needs grow it will continue to let me down and I don't want to get so customized that I can't upgrade either.

Thanks again Malcom.
Regards,

ps.

[kuske]

At the moment we use 4.5.1e, which seems to be a very stable version.
As 5.0.0x started in the last month I would never migrate to such a new version.
I even do not bye the newest computer nor the newest car on the market, do you? ;.)
So I think a Version 5.0.0e could be a very good start into line 5, perhaps even 5.0.0c ...

If you use SalesForce with 5 clients you should use it further. Only if you have the personal feeling that you need anything else, you should change the lines.

hk

[pstupp]

Thank you to everyone that replied, particularly those that steered me away from the 5.0 release toward 4.5.1. While 4.5.1 isn't bug free (still has all the same campaign mailer bugs that started much of my aggrevation) it is most certainly more stable than v5.0.

I guess it would have been nice if the v5.0 update indicated that it was a beta release or at the very least that it is highly unstable, that probably would have saved me a tremendous amount of frustration and would have led to a more favorable initial impression.

Thanks again,

ps

[lowJack01]

I guess I really expected a much more finished product for a company with so much marketing, again it's clear that a lot of work is going into the product but I just don't see how anyone could actually use it right now

Yes, I did too, six months ago when this adventure started for my company!

I view Sugar as a good general CRM template that must be customized for each company's own purposes. It works not only for our sales people, but for our customer service reps, accounting department and HR, and serves as a communication device in a company that is otherwise communicationally crippled. We are still rolling out features and conducting training sessions to push user adoption, six months later. I sincerely believe that this would happen with any similar tool (and has, at my company).

I work at a company of ~50 employees, so our communication issues are real and must be addressed before we have any hope of growing to the next stage.

In a company of five, I don't suppose you have such a concern with communication. But if you're using it for just sales tracking, sf does have the same features for a periodic fee, whereas SugarCRM offers the same thing for free.

Try 4.5.e, f, g, or h